Chapter 3 #10
Anything would be better than Eliza not looking at her while they speak.
She spits and then retches again.
If Eliza heard her throwing up, she doesn’t say anything about it when Susan emerges from the bathroom. She’s glad, at least, that she can maintain this one microscopic shred of dignity.
On the train back to the city, Eliza puts her headphones in and stares out the window. They don’t hold hands. Their legs and elbows don’t touch. They might as well be strangers seated next to each other.
Susan looks at Twitter but can’t actually focus on the words. She’s not sure which is making her feel more sick: her hangover or her panic. She doesn’t know why Eliza is ignoring her.
She texts Katie to distract herself. “I’m so happy for you guys. I’m sorry we left a little early.”
Katie writes back, “thanks, it’s okay.”
Oof, Susan thinks. Katie’s always brief when she’s pissed off.
Susan wonders if she should tell Katie the reason they left is because Eliza wanted to, because suddenly she turned to ice, shutting Susan out, but she doesn’t.
Besides, putting it in writing would make it real, and she’s still hoping that maybe it’s not, or at least maybe it’s not as bad as she thinks it is.
So instead, she writes, “My car got totaled!”
Katie doesn’t write back to this.
Susan types out: “are you mad at me?” but then deletes it. Instead, she says: “anyway ignore me and enjoy your new husband. Call me the second you get back from Greece.”
“You know I will xx,” Kate replies.
When they get to Grand Central, Susan isn’t sure what to do. Everything feels awkward and horrible. They pause at the entrance to the green line. Susan clutches her MetroCard.
“Do you want to come over and talk?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” Eliza says. “I just want to go home.”
“Please?”
A woman carrying grocery bags knocks into Susan on her way to the turnstile and Susan almost loses her balance.
“Look, Susan,” Eliza says, her face softening. She puts a hand on Susan’s arm. “I don’t know if we’re looking for the same thing.”
Susan imagines her heart falling out of her chest, shattering onto the floor in glistening wet shards. “What do you think I’m looking for? Is it because I said we should get married? I was just kidding.”
She hadn’t been kidding. She wants to marry Eliza. She’d pick Eliza up and carry her all the way to the courthouse right now. She’s never felt clearer on anything.
Eliza squeezes her arm. When she takes her hand away, Susan wonders if Eliza will ever touch her again.
“No, Susan, it wasn’t that. You just have all these wonderful connections to the past, and…” She trails off. “I’ve done a lot of work to move forward, you know? I can’t get stuck with all these people from Long Island.”
“Because of Kyle?” Susan says. She can barely breathe. People are staring at them, but she doesn’t care. “We never have to see him again.”
“It wasn’t just Kyle, no. And you do have to see him again.
” Eliza is being so gentle and direct that it’s making everything worse.
“He’s in your life. Katie is your best friend.
Jake is her husband. You can’t stop seeing them.
I wouldn’t want you to change your life for me like that.
” Her voice is too kind for the words she’s saying.
The 6 train pulls in and empties out. More people are milling around them now, occasionally bumping into them.
“I thought I could do it. That’s why I came. I really thought it would be fine. But it wasn’t. It’s too triggering. The way I felt last night? I can’t do that again. I can’t be part of that whole … scene.”
“But why?” Susan asks. “I don’t understand.” And then like a ton of bricks it hits her. She doesn’t know why she didn’t see it before. “Is Kyle the one who took the photo of you?”
“Maybe.” Eliza won’t meet her eyes.
“Well?” Susan presses, desperate for answers. “Did he?”
“I don’t know for sure, okay? And that’s not really the point.”
“He used to make me do stuff I didn’t want to do,” Susan says. “You’re not the only one with … trauma.”
She’s never called what Kyle did to her trauma, but now that she’s said it out loud, she realizes it’s somewhat true.
She can’t believe she’s divulging the most painful, private moments of her past in this dirty, crowded train station where strangers can see her, probably hear her.
Everything about this moment is wrong. She wants to pull Eliza to the side so that they’re less in the way of everyone rushing to catch their trains, but she can’t move.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Eliza says. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m just saying, I don’t want to be around him, either. We wouldn’t have to be.”
But Eliza just shakes her head, as though she doesn’t believe her.
“I can’t believe you’re reducing me to ‘people from Long Island,’” Susan cries.
“I have this big amazing life. They’re such a small part of it now.
” She realizes that in being so insistent, it sounds like she’s whining.
Or worse, begging. She doesn’t care, though.
She’ll beg. She’ll get on her knees if she has to.
“You can’t hold things Kyle did against me. It’s not fair.”
“Susan, I’m not,” Eliza says. “I’m not blaming you.”
“I should never have brought you to the wedding,” Susan says. “I knew it was too much, too soon.”
Eliza says nothing, patiently waiting for her to finish.
“You’ve already made up your mind,” Susan says. “There’s nothing I can say, is there?”
“I’m sorry,” Eliza says again.
“So it’s over?”
“I just can’t go backward.”
Tears flood Susan’s face. Never would she classify her feelings for Eliza as going backward. She wants Eliza to be her future.
“Okay,” Susan says. “See you never.”
“Can I hug you?” Eliza asks, but Susan shakes her head.
One final hug would be a cruelty. Besides: If she puts her arms around Eliza now, they’ll have to call the fire department to break her grip.
After Eliza walks away, Susan stands there for a long time, as though if she stays very still, Eliza might return and take it all back. Only when someone bumps into her so hard she drops her bag does she decide to go home.
When Katie and Jake get back from their honeymoon, Katie calls Susan and says, “I think this is the longest we’ve ever gone without talking to each other.”
Susan is in bed, where she’s been for the past week, calling in sick to work in order to wallow.
Her acne, which is usually manageable, has gone haywire, bursting in painful constellations along her jaws.
Canker sores cluster inside her cheeks. It’s as though her body has released a special sort of grief hormone to wreck her.
Mia has taken to making extra dinner for her, though she’s no longer capable of telling whether she’s hungry.
She’s mostly glad to not be alone through this crushing heartbreak, though a small part of her wishes she didn’t have a witness for what is without a doubt the lowest moment of her life.
Katie continues, “Do you and Eliza want to come over for dinner and look at pictures from Greece?”
Susan pulls the blanket over her face. “She dumped me.”
“What?” Katie exclaims. “Oh my god.”
“We wanted different things,” she says. “Allegedly.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay,” Susan says, weak with defeat. “I still want to see your photos.”
“It was so magical,” Katie says. “I can’t wait to show you.”
Susan wants Katie to ask for more detail about what happened with Eliza, so she can tell her about what Kyle said to them and the fallout from it, but Katie doesn’t ask her anything at all.
It’s probably for the best. Susan doesn’t want to taint Katie’s memory of her wedding with her own bad experience of it.
That would be selfish, she thinks. So she pushes it down, into the box where she keeps the memories of every terrible thing that ever happened with Kyle, and closes the lid.
Weeks pass. In March, Susan flies business class to Austin for SXSW, her first time out of economy, her first time going to Texas. She has this hope that the farther she gets from New York, the less thinking about Eliza will hurt.
She’s wrong. There’s nowhere on earth she could be that would make thinking of Eliza hurt less.
It’s at least a distraction, though. She, Drew, and a few of the others are going to share an Airbnb and spend two nights at the festival checking out new bands and listening to panels.
Thankfully, Ben isn’t coming; he wasn’t asked to speak on any panels this year, and thus can’t be bothered to show up.
On the airplane, Susan drinks the free champagne and watches Gone Girl. She falls asleep in the middle and wakes up as the wheels touch down.
In arrivals, she finds Drew, and they take an Uber to the house they’ve rented.
As they drive through downtown, she presses her face to the car window like a little kid.
Music is coming from every different direction and hordes of people are walking in the middle of the street, crowds of festivalgoers in crop tops and cowboy hats and denim and flower crowns.
It’s hot out, hotter than she realized it could be so early in the spring, and even though the AC is blasting, she’s sweating.
It makes sense that everyone outside is so near naked.
As they get to a main street, it seems like every house is dedicated to a tech company or a brand; there’s the Twitter house and the Uber house and the Fender house, marked with neon signage. She missed its heyday. It’s not an indie festival anymore. It’s decidedly corporate.
But so is she, she thinks, as she yanks her suitcase out of the car and walks up the steps to the bungalow she reserved on her company Amex. She sometimes wonders what the teenage version of herself would think of the woman she’s turned into. She’d probably judge her.
Susan is sitting on her bed with her laptop when Drew pops his head in. “You wanna go out?”